Shin Bet employees quizzed: Do you act according to Zionist values?

Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, has recently begun asking employees if they “act according to a Zionist value system”.

The question, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, was added to the organisation’s annual evaluation form for its staff. An editorial in the paper, by way of context, notes that three out of Shin Bet’s four senior officials “come from a national religious background”.

While the editorial points out that “the main task of the Shin Bet since 1967” has been “maintaining the Israeli occupation”, the ‘Zionist values’ question is as equally pertinent to the suppression of dissent by Palestinian citizens.

In 2007, the office of then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert sent a letter on behalf of the Shin Bet to a Balad party publication, affirming that the security service “will thwart the activity of any group or individual seeking to harm the Jewish and democratic character of the State of Israel, even if such activity is sanctioned by the law”.

The same year, the agency confirmed that it targets individuals seen to be “conducting subversive activity against the Jewish identity of the state”. In 2008, then-Shin Bet director Yuval Diskin told former U.S. ambassador to Israel Richard Jones that many Palestinian citizens “take their rights too far”, something with which the agency “is rightly concerned”. There are plenty of examples reflecting this approach – from interrogations to much worse, as in the case of Ameer Makhoul.

A decade previous, and during his first stint as Prime Minister, Netanyahu held a closed-doors discussion with ministers and security officials to discuss the “growing Palestinianization and religious radicalization among Israel’s Arabs”. A 1998 report “produced by the Shin Bet and cabinet ministers” attributed the threat posed by Palestinian citizens “mainly to the emergence of civil ideology, calling for Israel to become a state of its citizens”.

Yet another reminder, then, of the profoundly antidemocratic implications of Netanyahu’s demand for Israel to be recognised as a ‘Jewish state’.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.